In the Zheng Lab, Sumin Hong is developing computational tools to analyze endothelial cell (EC) behavior in 3D brain microvessels following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Her work focuses on creating a segmentation-free, pixel-level machine learning toolkit to quantify junctional features such as integrity, tortuosity, and internalization, which are factors critical to understanding blood-brain barrier dysfunction and vascular repair. This approach enables high-throughput, biologically meaningful phenotyping of ECs, facilitating mechanistic discovery and therapeutic development in complex vascular injury models.
